Reading Room

The Reading Room is where you can explore my rants at your leisure. I write about lots of things but I try to keep my posts organized into specific categories. Of course, many of my rants overlap categories so you will find them in more than one place. Think of this page as a digital card catalog of topics, and feel free to browse! And if you’re not sure where to start, I recommend you read about what I call the skeptical method first. It lays the foundation for how to be a good, scientific, critical thinker.

These rants focus on critical thinking skills – or the lack thereof. Usually they revolve around popular trends, behaviors, or beliefs that people uncritically accept. The point of the rant is to illustrate how better critical thinking skills can help people figure out how to analyze information and enhance their ability to make decisions about that information. The Logical Fallacies series in this category seeks to explain the most common logic mistakes people make and gives tips in how to recognize and avoid them.

These are the posts about culture and society at large. These rants often focus on some specific issue that has gotten me fired up, but I analyze them from a cultural and behavioral perspective. I usually incorporate other broad ideas from politics, economics, or science as well. The Shifting Perspective series in this category seeks to look at issues with new eyes or to compare our assumptions with the realities of other people, places, and cultures.

This is one of my favorite topics and I have a lot to say about it, but it doesn’t always fall under this specific category. I find that so much of culture, society, politics, technology et al are tied up in media and communication that this topic tends to find its way into many of my rants. Still, some of them are specific enough that they get filed to this category. In general, I rant about advertising, marketing, and social media in this category.

As noted above, many of my Culture & Society rants include political and economic topics. When politics and/or economics are the main topic, this is where the post ends up. If I’m writing largely about capitalism, ideology, or hegemony, then that’s political economy, and this is where you’ll find it. And if I’m ranting about a specific political issue – things like climate change, gun control, or health care – then you will probably find it here too.

Want to know what I think about issues like antibiotic resistance, genetically modified foods, vaccines, or climate change? What about how I feel about technologies such as cell phones, social media, and fracking? You’ve come to the right category. You’ll find the Technology and Its Discontents series here too, in which I rant about how technology is changing our lives – and not always for the better.

I come across articles nearly every day that I hope other people might want to read. These articles will cover all sorts of topics, so rather than put them into one of the main categories, I’ll file them here. They’ll also be archived by tags. This is going to be the category I use most frequently, but also the shortest posts.

Who is the Ranthropologist?

I am a classic four-field anthropologist, and I use my training to analyze and evaluate the world around me. I am a skeptic, a critical thinker, a professor, a reader, a writer, and a creator. My thoughts and observations often take the form of rants – hence, I am the Ranthropologist.